


hole in my heart like a wishing well

by blindmadness



Category: Der Räuberbräutigam | The Robber Bridegroom (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Gen, vague descriptions of graphic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 22:11:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3912460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindmadness/pseuds/blindmadness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a young woman's father announces her engagement to a mysterious gentleman, she is far from thrilled -- she knows something is wrong with him, even if no one else seems to see it. Unfortunately, she has no idea just how wrong he really is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hole in my heart like a wishing well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



> Nearly every time I sit down to write something, it ends up being longer than I intend, and I always react with surprise, like it hasn't happened a million times before. This time, though, I was REALLY surprised. So, uh, I hope you enjoy, because I definitely did not expect it to get this out of hand.
> 
> A quick note about the violence: as stated in the tag above, there's pretty terrible and extensive violence alluded to at length in this story, but almost none of it is described in more than vague terms, and then not in graphic detail.
> 
> A million thanks to the lovely [Kate](http://anotherwaytostand.tumblr.com/) and [Liz](http://sostickaround.tumblr.com/) for looking over this and making sure it didn't suffer too terribly for the ballooning word count! The title is from "Hitchhiker" by Empires.

Once there was a girl, the only child of a man whose heritage was genteel, but whose family had fallen on hard times, with the result that he had more reputation than means. The girl’s mother had died in childbirth and her father had never remarried, so she was his sole pride and joy. He was an indulgent but not unwise father, raising her to be generous, curious, and accomplished, to always be willing to help but to always know her own mind, to trust others but to trust her own instincts more.

As the girl grew into a young woman, her beauty turned many a young man’s head; several began flirtations with her, and a few even proposed. Her father, however, rejected them all. None of these local lads, without much more than a small house to their names, could truly provide for his daughter; none of them were the sort of man that could take care of her, give her the home that she deserved.

Unfortunately, the sort of suitor the man had in mind for his daughter wouldn’t offer for her. Despite her beauty, intelligence, and kindness, which drew men to her without much effort on her part, the young woman had but a small dowry, and men of means risked much by marrying poor girls with only distant connections to any sort of gentility. 

So the sort of men her father wished for her to marry did not offer, and her father rejected those who did, and so the young woman did not marry and stayed with him, for which she was privately quite grateful. She did wish to marry, one day, and to travel far from the town of her birth and see the world, but she saw the fondness in her father’s eyes when he spoke of his departed wife, and she wished to feel the same fondness for her future husband. She had yet to meet a man who inspired such a feeling in her, and she did not wish to marry until she did.

Three years after the young woman received her first marriage proposal, the gentleman came to town. He arrived quite suddenly, on business about which no one was informed, and when he gave his name, no one had heard of him. But he was extremely handsome and faultlessly polite, and his clothing more exquisitely tailored than any the town had ever seen. And for all that, he was quite generous with his money when purchasing any services, which must have meant that he had plenty to spare. 

Rumors began to swirl about him. He was renting a room at the inn (the largest they had), but they said he had a vast, remote estate of his own. They said that he was on the run from some sort of scandal (the specifics varied, ranging from the relatively innocuous to the vastly improbable). They said that he was secretly a duke, or at least related to the royal family in some way.

They said that he had traveled far in search of a wife.

The young woman didn’t meet him until he had been in town for a week. She was at the market in search of fresh vegetables for their supper table; she had just looked up from a batch of spinach she’d been inspecting and there he was at her side, a charming smile on his face, a suit culled directly from the height of fashion on his body.

Flustered at his sudden proximity (his handsomeness, she noted, had not been exaggerated), she barely managed to set her basket down without fumbling in order to offer an appropriate curtsey. He, in turn, executed a flawless bow, far lower than it needed to be to someone of her social position.

“My lady,” he said, his voice low and pleasant, barely above a rumble deep in his chest.

 _Miss,_ she thought, but did not think it was appropriate to say aloud. Whatever the rumors, he clearly outranked her; it was not her place to correct his address.

So she simply responded with “Sir,” and he nodded at her before parting from her company, leaving her a little breathless—though whether it was from excitement or alarm, she could not guess (her town did not offer much opportunity for either). And that, she found herself thinking, would likely be the end of that.

 

Except that it wasn’t, and two days later, the young woman’s father sat down at the table for supper and announced, beaming, that he had accepted an offer for her hand in marriage.

“The foreign gentleman offered for you, my dear,” he told her, practically bursting with pride, and the young woman found her heart sinking, so swiftly it surprised her.

“He made it very clear that he truly wanted you,” he said, his eyes twinkling with unrestrained delight. “And how generous he would be with your livelihood—oh, my darling, you shall live like a queen! How much money he has. And position, certainly—he may be a duke in disguise! Think of that!”

The young woman forced herself to give a light laugh, not wanting her sudden, sharp unease to spoil her father’s joy. “You know better than to listen to such rumors,” she reprimanded him lightly.

He smiled at her, wide and genuine, reaching across the table to clasp her hand in both of his. “Regardless, my girl, he is wealthy, and he is enamored of you—he spoke to me plainly, for he must have known I would see through undue flattery, but he spoke so highly of you, of your beauty and kindness, how you have enraptured him. He will take care of you, and you will have everything you need, everything you desire. He could have any girl in the world he wanted—and he chose you!”

It should, perhaps, have warmed her heart, but inside her chest, the young woman could only feel cold. Rather than feel special that she was chosen, she could only wonder what about her had drawn the attention of such a man. If, indeed, he could have any woman he desired, why was it her that he wanted? 

Still, she knew that while her father was indulgent, he was set in his ways, and he wished for her to wed to a man he believed to be right for her. If this was his decision, there was not much that she could do.

She tried to take heart. Perhaps he would be kind—his praise of her, while bewildering (when had he a chance to witness her personality?), was quite flattering. Perhaps he would be, in the end, exactly the sort of husband she had always wished for. Perhaps the unease coiling in her gut every time she so much as thought of him was utterly unfounded.

 

But the young woman did not for a moment truly believe this, and her worries only increased as the days went on. What should have been a comforting new proximity to her future bridegroom had only served to make her fear him more.

She spent time with him—in supervised environments and in public, as was right for a betrothed couple—and it seemed to her that each time that they met, she would notice a new strange thing about him. The unnatural paleness of his skin, for one thing. The cold temperature of his fingers against hers, no matter the weather. The darkness of his eyes, which were pure black in color, but not flat—rather a deep, hypnotizing sort of black, like staring down the edge of an abyss into the almost inviting depths below.

And above all else, she noticed that the profound aversion she felt to her future husband—the dread that prickled the fine hairs at the back of her neck, that had suffused her entire being since the first time she’d seen him—was not going away. In fact, it became stronger with each meeting.

Superficially, she could find no fault with him. He was sometimes reticent in his speech, but dazzlingly articulate when he chose to be. He was intelligent and well-read and if he was occasionally arrogant or short-sighted, it was to be expected from someone raised with wealth and privilege. He did not appear to mistreat shopkeepers or his own servants, and he observed all of the courtesies of society. He always paid the young woman sweet compliments and treated her father with respect—and, of course, he was strikingly, brilliantly handsome, so much so that even the young woman, who mistrusted him so deeply that she could not even begin to explain why, lost her breath when he smiled.

She could see no one else reacting the same way she did. Everyone seemed eager to curry favor with this mysterious, rich gentleman; every sign of flirtation from him was met with a swoon of delight, every kind word with gratitude far disproportionate to what it must have cost him to speak it. Everyone seemed to believe that any eccentricities on his behalf were easily excused by his wealth and his mysterious background.

The young women knew that she couldn’t speak of her fears to anyone, not even her father, who was in raptures over his daughter’s perceived vast good fortune. And as she was a basically honest person, she could not bring herself to treat her future bridegroom as a woman eager to be wed to her suitor ought to be, even when it began to cause gossip.

“They’re whispering about you in the market,” her father told her one evening, looking more confused than disapproving, which relieved her. “They say you’re disappointed to be wedding the gentleman, because you have a—a lover, or because you’re carrying another’s child, or because you have a demon inside of you that shies away from the touch of goodness.”

That last one made her laugh without quite meaning to. It was both absurd and too close to quite the opposite for her comfort. “Father, what have I told you about listening to market talk? Surely you must realize how ridiculous that is.”

He didn’t laugh with her; instead his brow furrowed and he looked much more serious. “My darling,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t matter what I believe. I know these to be vicious lies, but they are rooted in the very real truth that you do not behave warmly toward your bridegroom. You are polite to him; you treat him with all of the courtesy with which I raised you. But you are not affectionate, and you do not respond to his affections. Sometimes I think—”

He broke off, then, shaking his head, and the young woman forced herself to ask, softly, “What, Father?”

He raised his head, and it broke her heart to see that his gaze was almost fearful. “Sometimes I think you shy away from him, when he touches you. That you recoil from him. Why would you do such a thing? From this man who cares for you, who wishes to give you everything?”

She knew, then, from the look on his face, that he would never believe her. That she could never say anything. That she would be trapped with this man as her husband, and she might never know what it was about him that terrified her so. 

 

The engagement had lasted for nearly two weeks when the young woman and the gentleman took a walk after supper; the days were long, so the sun had not quite set yet, and the evening was bathed in golden light that made the world look gilded and warm. The gentleman, however, with his pale skin and dark coloring, looked strange, sallow, and unnatural. The young woman tried her hardest not to look at him.

“We have been betrothed for some time now,” he told her as they strolled arm in arm down the streets. “The wedding will be next week.”

The young woman knew this, of course, but could not help but feel a shudder run through her body at the thought. She did not know how she would submit to this man as her husband. She could not even think of their wedding night without feeling as if iron bands were constricting her chest.

Still, she smiled at him politely and nodded. “It will be beautiful,” she said, for it was true, and she needed to give him a response of some sort, so that he would not suspect how deeply she was dreading it.

He smiled at her, one of his wide lovely smiles, and she did her best to hold her own smile on her face in response. “Afterward, of course, you will move with me to my estate,” he said. “It is many miles from here, and very vast. It will take time for you to become accustomed to living there.”

The young woman nodded. She wasn’t sure why the gentleman was telling her this; it was no new information to her. She was not at all looking forward to it, moving miles away from her father, possibly to never see him again—never to come home to the town she had always known. This was not at all the way she had wished to see the world.

“Before we do so,” the gentleman said after a moment, thoughtfully, “I believe we’ll spend a week in my home in the woods. Ah, you didn’t realize I had one so close?” He laughed, though not mockingly, at the surprise the young woman was certain showed on her face. “I hardly use it, to be honest. It is isolated and hard to find, and overall not terribly hospitable for long stretches of time. But it will be a good transition home for you—close enough for you to see your father and this town, and far enough for you to become used to having your own household. What say you, my dear?”

It wasn’t the first endearment the gentleman had used for her, but each of them made the young woman’s skin crawl. Still, it was a generous offer, and it made her wish, again, that she could simply view him as everyone else did—as a kind, slightly eccentric, brilliantly handsome, wealthy man. He had never given any indication that he had anything but her best wishes in mind, and this was another example.

“I would like that,” she said slowly, because she wasn’t sure if she truly would or not. She dreaded going away to the gentleman’s estate, but the thought of being alone with him in a remote house in the woods was almost worse. “It is very kind of you,” she added, more genuinely, forcing herself to meet his dark eyes. That she did mean.

He chuckled softly, taking her free hand and raising it briefly to his cold lips. “Anything for you, my dear,” he said, and the words had an odd lilt to them that she could not quite read. She wasn’t accustomed to such mysterious people; his words never quite seemed to mean exactly what they said, but she never knew what they _did_ mean.

When they approached the door of the young woman’s home, the gentleman turned to her, dark gaze on hers. “The day before our wedding,” he said slowly, the words grave, “I would like you to come to my home—the home that will be ours. But you must not come until the evening, after you have eaten your supper. The home won’t be ready before then.”

Something about the words alarmed the young woman, or perhaps it was the tone in which he spoke them, or the hint of a smile on his face. But she knew she could not refuse without stirring his suspicion or risking her father’s anger, so she nodded, and she murmured, “That would be lovely. I would like that very much.”

The gentleman smiled at her once more, but it was a smile with something that lurked behind it, and again, the young woman was not certain what it could be. “We will make arrangements,” he told her, and he kissed her hand (again she shivered at the touch of his cold lips on her skin) and bid her goodnight.

 

With the day of her wedding rushing closer and closer, the young woman knew that she had to do something. She did not have much power now, but when she was eternally tied to the mysterious, dangerous gentleman, she would have none at all, and so if she wanted to act, now was the right time. Now was the only time.

The morning before her wedding, she cleaned up after breakfast, kissed her father’s cheek, and told him that she was going to visit the gentleman’s home in the woods, their future temporary home.

“Did he not say it would only be ready in the evening?” her father asked, his brow creasing.

The young woman smiled at him, her sunniest and most radiant smile. “He did. But surely it isn’t fair to ask the servants of my new home to do all the work without their mistress? If I am to be a true wife to him, I must show my willingness to help, even now. I believe it will start the marriage off on the best note if I arrive early, to show I am eager to being my new life with him.”

Her father beamed at her, proud of her change of heart, and he embraced her to wish her well, and she hid her worry and fear behind a wide smile as she hailed a carriage to take her to the home in the woods.

She did not know exactly where the house was, in what direction in the wild forest, but the carriage driver took her as far as he could down the beaten path, before the trees began to grow truly wild and the paths became completely impassable.

“These woods are dangerous, miss,” the driver told her as he opened the door, his face grave. “You should not venture further. You may be lost without much hope of being found again.”

The young woman smiled at him and thanked him for his concern, and asked him to call for help if she did not return by sunset, and she ventured further into the forest herself.

Her confidence began to wane the further into the forest she walked. She had brought a bag of flour with her to strew behind herself as she walked, to see where she had been and to find her way out if she got lost; it was a risky manner of marking her path, but she did not have much of any other choice. Still, as the trees became thicker, and she was barely able to take a step without breaking several branches and catching her dress on the trunks of the trees surrounding her, and she could tell from the direction of the sun that it was passing noon, she began to believe that she might truly never find this house, and be lost here for the rest of her short life.

But she pressed onward, and perhaps a quarter of an hour later, the trees began to thin again, and the young woman heard the quiet rush of a brook. She found the small clearing through which it ran shortly after, and she knelt to drink from its waters eagerly, long past caring that it would muddy her already ragged skirts further.

She took a moment to rest on a large, flat rock near the brook, listening to the sounds of the forest. They seemed quieter here, which she thought might be a good sign. She would, she decided, walk for another hour. If she had not found the house by then, she would try to make her way back and figure out what she else could do next.

But fortune was with her, because she had barely walked a few minutes past the small clearing with the brook when she found another, which was much wider, and she could see, at its edge, a house, and she knew instantly that she had to be in the right place.

Apprehension gripped her chest more strongly than ever as she approached the house. What did she truly expect to find here? What did she think her groom-to-be would be hiding in this place? Why did he want her to come here? Would she be able to recover or escape from whatever she found—would it be enough to stop their betrothal and free her from him for good?

She knew that she wouldn’t know until she set foot inside the house. Watching it loom closer and closer did nothing to lessen her fear, but she had come too far to walk away now. Whatever was inside the house, whatever waited for her, she needed to know what it was. She would have no other chance.

The house itself, once the young woman got close enough to reach it, appeared normal, if—like the gentleman who owned it—eccentric. It had appeared black from a distance, but was actually a dark grey, and she could not tell if it was faded by intention or if it had been black and the paint had worn away. It was large but not overwhelming, with two stories and two small outbuildings. She counted six windows along the second floor and four at the first, a large double door flanked by a porch between them. The design of the home was simple, with no decorations along the windows and only some simple stylization among the columns lining the porch. There was no other color but grey in the decoration.

Seeing it evoked the same reaction in her that the gentleman himself always did—prickles of anxiety, shivers of fear, and that creeping of cold inside her chest, like touching the cold of his skin. She took a deep breath, marshalling every reserve of courage she had, and approached the door.

She thought about knocking, but the entire point of her arriving now was to frustrate whatever plans the gentleman had for her, and she did not want to announce her arrival. So she turned the doorknob and found that the door was not locked, but creaked softly as she pushed it open to step inside the house.

There were no lamps or candles inside the house; the only light came in through the large windows, which the young woman noted were slightly dusty, lined with heavy, dark curtains. The furniture in the house—couches, armchairs, small tables—appeared to be well-made and fashionably styled, but simplistic and did not appear to have been used often. It looked, in fact, almost new.

She frowned, looking around the house. Was anyone else even here? Were there no servants, no one to keep the place when their master wasn’t using the house? She wondered how often he came to this place, if it appeared so abandoned because he used it very rarely or if he had recently bought it. She wondered if the large, seemingly empty house was the only reason her heart was beating faster in her chest, her breath coming a little faster.

She forced her nerves down, forced her breathing to steady, and set out to explore the rest of the house.

The rest of it looked much the same as the room in the front—the parlors, the dining room, the ballroom. The kitchen (smaller than she would expect in a house of this size) was absolutely untouched, the fine layer of dust from the windows doubled on each surface there. The young woman studied each room carefully as she moved through the house, and she could not help but feel strongly that this house was never meant for habitation to begin with.

She approached the wide, elegantly curved staircase leading to the second floor; upon closer inspection, she realized that the dust was even thicker here. She frowned up at the darkness of the second floor and ascended, slowly, covering her mouth to stifle the coughs that emerged as the dust swirled around her.

By the time she reached the top of the stairs, it was abundantly clear to her that no one had ever set foot on this floor of the house, making her earlier suspicions all the stronger. There was next to no furniture in the few rooms she could see, and what little there was was covered in cloth, and the cloth, too, caked in dust. She descended the stairs again quickly, her hand still over her mouth.

The confusion she had felt upon first seeing the house, and her first instinct about it, was only increasing. Had her future husband ever truly intended to form the house for her occupation—and if so, how was he planning to do such a thing? It seemed impossible that the house would truly be habitable without weeks of work, and she could not imagine what purpose there would be in inviting her to it beforehand.

Which meant that his purpose in inviting her here had to be something else, and she did not look forward to finding out what it was.

On her second slow circle through the lower floor of the house, she found, near the kitchen, a door. Unassuming, made of a similar material as the bare walls, so designed that a person’s eyes would skim over it without seeing unless they were looking carefully. A small door, just big enough for a person of average size to fit through, with a small doorknob on the right, which looked as if it had recently been polished. A stark contrast to the disorder of most of the rest of the house.

It was here, the young woman knew. When she looked at the door, she felt the same skitter of apprehension, the same bone-deep aversion and fear that she felt whenever she beheld the gentleman. Here, she would find out what she needed to know.

She was terrified, but she approached the door, closer her fingers around the knob, and pushed.

This door did not creak, indicating that it had been used more than some of the others, and it opened into a dark stairwell, so dark the young woman could hardly see her hand before her eyes. She had barely taken two steps when a foul scent met her nose, and she barely resisted crying out as she covered her nose with a hand, gasping for breath as quietly as she could. She had no idea what the smell could be, but it provoked in her the same agonizing sense of unease that she had felt at the door and the house and its owner.

Her stomach roiling with fear, the young woman tried her hardest to keep breathing without inhaling and descended to the bottom of the staircase.

The space she reached at the bottom of the stairs was small, uncarpeted, the floorboards giving way a little to her feet, not so much creaking as sighing. It was dark down there, too, but she saw to her left a hint of light coming in from other rooms, so she turned towards it.

A simple doorway separated her from the other room, a small lamp burning in the corner, set on a nightstand. It was the first thing she saw, her eyes seeking the light. The second was that the floor of this room was tile rather than wood, appearing to be a light grey color, scuffed and worn.

Then she turned, slowly, to survey the rest of the room, and when she saw the opposite wall, she barely had time to clap both hands over her mouth to stifle her scream.

There were two women in the room, both of them bound by the wrists and ankles, their arms raised over their heads and tied to hooks attached to the ceiling. They were nearly naked, dressed only in the barest undergarments, and their bodies were marked with bruises and scars, standing out more against the unnatural paleness of their skin. Their bodies hung limp from the hook, their eyes closed, their feet just barely dragging along the floor.

The young woman felt bile at the back of her throat, felt another scream working its way up her throat, felt hot tears prickling at her eyes, felt her breath crowding in her chest, each one coming right on the heels of the other, choking her. She stumbled a step back, her footsteps on the tile unnaturally loud in the nearly empty room, and she bent over, clutching her arms around her stomach, closing her eyes tightly, and forcing herself to breathe, _breathe,_ not to let herself faint or cry or scream again. She had to hold herself together. She had come this far. She could not stop. She could not falter. Not now.

Once she felt as if she was more in control of her reactions—though she was still shaking from head to toe, and she could still taste bitterness in her mouth—she slowly straightened, forcing herself to look at the women. She stared at them until her vision blurred, until she was certain she could watch them without giving overt outward signs of her bone-deep horror.

She became convinced, the more she studied the women, that they were not dead but in some sort of deep sleep—the movements of their chests were shallow, but still present. Their markings were strange to her, some of the wounds looking like punctures while some were short, horizontal cuts. Both women looked young and deeply tired; in addition to the pallor of their skin, their faces looked sunken, their limbs unnaturally thin, and the shadows under their eyes dark. As the young woman looked at the floor below them, she saw that the tile looked discolored, though she did not know if the yellow shade of the tiles was due to the color of the lamplight or due to staining.

She tried her best to study the women with a detached eye, taking in their dark hair and young faces and multitude of injuries as coolly as she could. But her heart was pounding still, and the clammy certainty of something being terribly wrong was creeping across every inch of her skin. She did not want to think about what this meant, whether her betrothed meant to hide this from her or—more horribly—to show it to her.

Had this been what he had meant to prepare for her? To get rid of this—or some even more terrible alternative?

As she was trying to prevent her mind from working too quickly and her tears from falling from her eyes, the young woman noticed that there was another room, past the one she was currently in. Dread spiraled in her stomach at what new horror she might find there, but she had come too far now. She had to keep going. She needed to see this through to the end, to know everything that was housed here.

Taking a deep breath, trying to steady her pounding heart, she walked into the last room.

It was deeply dark, the light of the lamp barely penetrating the scope of it, a large room half covered in wooden floorboards. The other half appeared to have no floor at all, simply the dirt of the forest floor surrounding the shapes of seven coffins, lined up side by side across the floor.

The young woman’s breath caught in her throat. Bodies—of other women that had been treated in a similar manner to those in the other room? It seemed strangely respectful for anyone who could dispose of people so callously, but she could not think of a single other use for them.

Trying not to wince at the tread of her shoes on the exposed dirt (strange, she thought, that this would still bother her, after all she’d seen), she approached the leftmost coffin, and again had to muffle her instinctive scream with a hand.

The coffin was occupied, but by a man, who appeared to be normal in almost every way—of average stature, dressed in fine clothing, his face more handsome than usual. His arms were crossed over his chest, his eyes were closed, and—the young woman peered closer to be more certain—he was lying perfectly still, no indication of breath or any other sign of life about him. Yet he did not _seem_ dead—there were no wounds to his body and his expression was peaceful, as if he were truly just asleep in the open coffin.

Shuddering, the young woman took a step back, taking a moment to attempt to compose herself (as if such a thing were possible anymore) before moving to the next coffin. The sight that greeted her was exactly the same: a well-dressed, handsome man with his arms folded, his expression peaceful, and no signs of life but no visible indication of death. 

Each of the next four coffins was the same, and the creeping unease of something being terribly wrong was settling along the young woman’s spine, even before she approached the seventh coffin and peered in, her hands clenched into loose fists.

The seventh coffin was empty.

She stumbled back half a step as her mind whirled, slowly beginning to understand. And little though she wanted to, she turned around to face the doorway.

Her future husband stood there, leaning against the door with his arms crossed, a smile on his face, so casual in posture and expression that he could have been waiting for a partner in a ballroom. Even from this distance, though, and even in the dark, the young woman could tell that there was a darkness to his face, a predatory intent to his form. And she felt herself rooted to the ground in sheer terror unlike any she had ever known before.

“Ah,” he said, and his voice was light, but with an undertone of menace so clear, none would have been able to mistake it. “My lovely wife-to-be. How fortunate for me that you are so poor at disguising your true feelings. I knew you would countermand my word, and in doing so you have passed my final test.”

The silence stretched on for longer than it should have, because it took the young woman an unnaturally long time to find her voice. It emerged as a mere croak once she did. “T—test?”

The gentleman nodded, and lit by the lamp, she could see a feral gleam in his eyes. “Had you obeyed me,” he said, taking a step back to indicate the wall of the other room—the wall where the women hung, “you would have become one of them. One of our many victims.”

It was all the young woman could do to keep breathing normally. Her mind was so crammed full of horror and fear, she could hardly even begin to think. “What—what have you done with them?”

He gestured at them as if they were of no consequence—which they must be, to him, to be treated as such. “They must sleep during the day, so they are drugged. Quite heavily, otherwise the consequences could be—well. Messy.” He shrugged, an elegant and dismissive gesture. “We could feed during the day, of course, but much easier for us to do so at night, and much easier for our prey to conform to our schedule.”

His teeth glinted white as he grinned at her, and the young woman whispered, “That was not what I meant.”

He laughed, a single, loud bark. “Oh yes, I am quite aware. What have we done with them? We have drunk their blood. We keep them here in case we run short on prey in other places. It’s to our advantage to have plans for all of our meals.

“We let them rest for several days in between,” he continued, pacing up the room, all casual, as if he were not saying things horrific beyond imagining. “It lets them replenish their blood. And we let them rest, and we feed them well. Truly, until they die, it is not the worst life imaginable.” He paused, stroking his chin, and the young woman noticed dimly that he was even wearing gloves. The perfect image of a society gentleman. “Although I am told that the act of—bloodletting, if you will—is quite painful. No matter; with the drugs, they sleep quite soundly, and the wounds are quite small. They heal quickly.”

For a moment, the only sound between them, in the dead silence of the house, was the young woman’s shaky breathing. She did not know how she would ever even begin to process all of the horrors she had just heard the gentleman blithely confess to. “And—and then you kill them,” she whispered softly, her voice shaking.

“Oh, yes.” The gentleman’s teeth gleamed again, a quick flash of white. “After a while they no longer become useful—the job of consistently providing meals is quite strenuous. And to be honest, drinking the same blood day after day is quite… well, _boring._ And of course we cannot enjoy variety in our meals and stay in the same place for too long. Often we dispose of them when we move, though sometimes they outlive their usefulness sooner.”

He stopped to study his hand, as if inspecting his nails—a useless gesture, considering his gloves. “A shame for them, actually, that I met you here. They might have lasted us another week or two otherwise. But now, of course, we have to move.”

The young woman let out a sound that was too choked to be a squeak of fear—but really, she could not keep her silence any longer upon hearing that. “Because—because of me? Why?”

The gentleman’s expression, this time, was not so much as a smile as a predatory baring of his teeth. “Oh, my dear, didn’t you guess? Because of our betrothal. You did not think that I—that _we_ —could stay here, after what I intend to do with you?”

The young woman’s eyes were wide, and her breath was still stuttering in her throat, but she managed to keep her voice more or less steady as she whispered, “You said—that this was a test. That if I’d listened to you, you would—keep me here. Feed on me. But—but I didn’t. So—what will you do now?”

The gentleman didn’t respond, but his mouth stretched again in a wide snarl, and he took two steps forward, standing right in front of the young woman. She stayed where she was; no one would hear her if she screamed, and the gentleman’s grip, when he reached to take her wrist, was like steel—he had been holding back his strength, each time he’d touched her before. She would not be able to fight him. She would not be able to overpower him.

Still, when he pulled her to him, wrapped his arm around her waist, pinning both her arms to her sides, and tilted her head back to expose her neck, she still instinctively struggled in his grip. And when he bore his teeth again and she saw fangs in his upper row of teeth, and when those fangs descended to piece the skin of her neck, she could not help but scream.

 

After, the young woman lay insensible for a full day and night, and during the few times that she was aware, all that she knew was pain.

The first time she woke, she was lying down, and she had a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth, and her heart was beating so hard she thought it must be bruising her chest, breaking her bones, and she could feel fire in every single one of her limbs, and she tried to scream but she could not. The fire did not go away every other time she woke, but her heartbeat became quieter and quieter, and soon it did not bother her at all. The fire, on the other hand, sharpened, filling her veins, searing her blood, burning in her eyes, which left her unable to open them, burning in her throat, which left her feeling so raw she could not form any sounds to express her agony.

When she finally felt herself wake without immobilizing pain, and she was finally able to force her eyes open, they felt grainy, full of sand, and impossibly heavy. But despite the enormous effort, instead of the blurriness that usually greeted her gaze when she felt so terrible, she found that she could see the room around her with perfect clarity. She could see the faded dark grey of the paint on the walls, each place where it was chipping away, see the precise shade and grain of the ground that covered the floor. And the silence of the house seemed, too, sharper and more profound than it had been earlier.

She sat up gingerly, bracing herself for any pain, but she was surprised to notice that she felt all right—quite all right, in fact. Possibly better than she had in her entire life. Though her throat was still burning, and she felt a little sore, and the metallic taste was still in her mouth, and her memory of everything that had happened since the gentleman had attacked her was muddled still.

She was surprised to note that she would expect herself to feel shocked, alarmed, disgusted at the memory of the attack—but it felt dim, far away, as if they were emotions from a distant time in her life rather than the last thing she could remember. And when she turned to the other side of the room, she was not startled to see the gentleman sitting in a chair, mere feet away from the coffin, watching her.

“Good morning,” he said with a sardonic smile, his tone excessively polite. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the deep silence of the room. “Or, rather, good evening. For us, it is much the same thing.”

The young woman frowned, looking instinctively toward the wall where a window would be. When she looked back at the gentleman, he was shaking his head.

“It has been approximately a day and a half since you were last awake and aware,” he explained, his tone falsely solicitous. The young woman noticed that while before, she had detected only undercurrents of malice or shadow in his tone, it now sounded at the forefront, obvious in his every word. “I have taken the liberty of informing your father of your whereabouts.”

“My father?” the young woman croaked, her voice hoarse from disuse. She was ashamed to realize that she had not thought of him at all, nor of the coachman who had taken her to the forest.

The gentleman nodded, his expression smug. “Not the truth, of course—that would be far too messy. He has been told that you found the home so to your liking that we anticipated our wedding vows, and we will require privacy to establish our new household. By the time he realizes it has been weeks since he has seen you, we shall be long gone.”

Her brow furrowed as she studied this man who was now—as far as the world was concerned—her husband. He grinned at her, leaning forward to cup her cheek in his hand; no longer afraid of the consequences, she jerked away from him, and he leaned back in the chair again, clearly not bothered by the rejection. “Never fear, my lovely wife. I don’t plan to take you out into the public eye for a long time now. You are too young for that yet—too young and too hungry.”

For a moment, his words did not register properly—they seemed completely out of context. But she felt herself swallowing instinctively, and found that the metallic taste in her mouth lessened the burning in her throat, just for a moment. And she realized that she could hear her own swallow, which seemed unnaturally loud—and it finally occurred to her that she found the room so silent because she could no longer hear her own heart beating.

Finally, the terror broke through her shell of distant feeling, and she pressed a hand urgently to her chest—but she felt nothing there. No movement at all, no sensation, no flutter of the pulse in her wrist. Nothing.

Her mouth dropped open in shock, and that was when she felt them. She carefully touched her tongue to the tips of the two fangs descending from her top line of teeth, and turned her horrified gaze to the gentleman’s knowing grin.

“Come along, my dear,” he said, getting to his feet. “We have quite a bit to teach you.”

 

There were eight of them in total, including the young woman—the gentleman and the six others who had been asleep in the coffins when she had first entered the house. There were, he explained to her, many more in the world, they believed, but they rarely encountered others of their kind.

This particular band of them had been together for nearly ten years, on and off. The gentleman was the undisputed leader; he really was (or had been) a member of the gentry, but had left that life behind long ago. The young woman never found out how old he truly was, only that he was older than his companions, both physically and in longevity. The others were young men of good but not exceptional birth who had, along their way, crossed paths with him and decided to join his band.

They seemed primarily drawn together through lawlessness and brutality; they did not feed simply for sustenance, they did it for pure enjoyment. The drawing of blood through increasingly awful means was a sport to them. They made the draining of humans a terrible, vicious thing, a long drawn-out torture rather than a meal, and the best game of all was to see which of them could desecrate a body most thoroughly. The gentleman, as their leader, was capable of the worst of the unspeakable horrors.

They only had a few rules, as the gentleman explained to the young woman when they were leaving the house in the woods. They were to stay together unless one of them truly wished to leave (as they had lost several prior members of their gang), because they were safer and more effective hunters as a group. They were to pick victims carefully, and to feed judiciously. They were not to stay in any one place for too long, and to clear all traces of their presence when they left. They were not to draw too much attention to themselves, because it was difficult to kill their kind, but it was not impossible—he told her of the process, which required strength and effort and dedication, so it was rare, but it could happen.

So they cleared their belongings out of the house in the woods, killed the women who were hanging in the cellar, and burned the house itself to the ground before setting off to another, miles away. They had dozens, the young woman found out, scattered throughout the country, each waiting to be inhabited, a new one ready to spring up in its place if they had to swiftly abandon any one of them. The houses themselves were miles and miles apart, but the group could travel quickly—they almost never tired, and they did not need sleep the way humans did. They reached the new house in two days’ time, though it was a place that looked completely unfamiliar. She did not know how far away it was, only that it was to be her new home.

Here, far away from everything she knew, the young woman learned how to adjust to her new life. She became accustomed to wearing only black (the gentleman had a collection of simple black gowns, and she never asked where he got them), as the rest of them did. The sun burned her skin for the first week after she was turned, but she slowly began to feel it less and less; the gentleman told her that they usually slept during the day and hunted at night, but going out during the day was the best way to fit in to a new town, if they needed to do so, so the ability to adapt was important. She learned how to sheath her fangs, how to fake the rhythm of breathing if she had to, how to hide her preternatural senses.

She learned, too, how to drink blood. The thought was abhorrent to her, and the gentleman could tell; he reassured her that she would get over it, that it would come to seem natural to her, even better than eating food. This prediction did not come true, but she learned how to hide her disgust better, to pretend that she enjoyed it—not difficult, since it did ease her thirst and sustain her, and she felt herself growing stronger the more she ingested, much as she hated it.

She had thought, briefly, about simply refusing to drink it, to not participate in the life that seemed an abomination to her. But then she would not have been able to survive, and her last days would have been full of agony and weakness, and she did not want to end her own existence to spite the creature who had forced this new life upon her. She decided that she would do what she had to do to survive, no matter how abhorrent. That was all she could think about now.

The first several weeks in the new home, the young woman subsisted almost entirely on the new women brought to be kept and chained in the cellar. Sometimes, for a change, the other members of the gang would bring people they had hunted to her. She wondered, at the time, why they did it; she later realized that they were treating her as a favored pet, a novelty. She never fully drained the strangers they brought to her, though she knew it didn’t truly matter, that they would die anyway. It still made a difference to her.

The young woman swiftly found out that the gentleman’s description of the lives of the women who were her primary sustenance had been nothing but lies—these women suffered the most, terrible indignities inflicted onto them between the times that they were used for blood. Often every man fed on them at the same time, and the only part that the gentleman had not lied about was how much the process hurt.

When she drank from them, she forced herself to be deaf to their cries and pleas and screams. She could not afford to let herself be swayed. She was under no illusions that she had any control here; she knew that her punishment would be severe if she were to take pity on them or release them. The gentleman had not said so, but it was nonetheless very clear.

“Why did you change me?” she asked him near the end of their first month in the new home, as he was finishing off the young man she had fed from. Possibly in deference to her, the gentleman had done nothing but drain the man of blood, for once neglecting the usual depravities and tortures. “Why did you initiate our engagement to begin with?”

He looked up from the young man’s corpse to the young woman, his gaze raking over her worn black gown, her messily bound hair, the smear of blood she knew lingered at the corner of her mouth. His inspection of her was thorough, more intimate that a caress—not that she would know, as he had never touched her in any but the most casual ways. He, as usual, was immaculate, even after a violent feeding.

“When people suspect us,” he said, after a moment’s thought, “it is usually prudent to dispose of them, and swiftly. No one ever realizes the truth, of course, but all the same, eyes on us are never wise. It is rare that a woman is the one suspicious, but you aren’t the first, my dear.”

“Did you kill the others?” she asked. There was no need for the niceties of polite speech anymore, and he was usually more likely to answer her honestly if she was blunt.

He took a moment, but he nodded, looking pensive, as if the loss of this life was nothing to him. (Which she knew it was.) “I did try to turn the first one, but it didn’t take.” He shook his head as if in regret, but she didn’t believe that he was capable of any emotion so soft. “She choked on my blood, when I made her drink it, and never drew breath again. A shame, and a waste of good blood. The others have all died through more natural means.”

Natural means, the young woman thought. Murder. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

It would have horrified her, a month ago, to speak so casually of her own death. Now, she did so with an expressionless face, and the gentleman bared his teeth at her.

“Boredom,” he said, and he sounded amused. “After so long a time alive, you wish to try new things. And you intrigued me. I so clearly repulsed you, but you were so willing to do your duty anyway and not object to me openly. And yet you couldn’t do so at the expense of your true feelings. I wanted to see which side of your nature won out, and that would decide your fate.”

Not for the first time, the young woman wondered if she would have been better off following her duty and ending up dead.

 

When there was no danger to the gang, they slept during the day and hunted at night, unless some of them chose to do otherwise. Sometimes one or more of them would mingle in nearby towns during the day; sometimes they would hunt then instead, for a change of scenery. But always at least one stayed awake, keeping guard over the sleeping others. Not that it was a true sleep, of course; when they took their rest, they lay like the dead, completely insensible until the sun rose, and nearly nothing could wake them. It was closer to a sort of temporary death than any human’s sleep could be.

It was at that time that they were most vulnerable, which was why someone always had to keep guard. Not that any humans would realize what they were, let alone how to kill them—but just in case. It would, after all, only take one.

For the first several weeks of the young woman’s time with the gang, she was not strong enough to keep watch, and she needed all of the rest that she could get, to build her strength in her new life. When she first began to be able to bear the touch of the sun, when she was able to stay fully awake during the day again, she too took her turns on the watch. Someone else, though, would always stay awake with her. Usually they did not speak (most of the others did not speak to her at all, only the briefest of comments here and there), but the young woman knew nonetheless that they were there to watch her. She was not yet to be truly trusted.

She could feel them watching her in other ways, too—it took them nearly a month to teach her how to hunt on her own, to show her how to corner humans and overpower them before draining them of blood. She refused to go into town, to charm people into leaving with her willingly, as the others did; it would be too hard, and her own humanity was still too close for her to overcome it. She would instead travel through the forest (she could move much more quickly now, and the thickness of the trees no longer bothered her) to find travelers in the woods—small groups that she got better and better at subduing, or someone would travel with her, to give her a better chance at trapping all of them. Sometimes the others would still bring humans to her, endlessly amused by her reluctance to kill. It took her a long time to realize that they found it funny because it meant that they viewed her as pathetic, as far weaker than they were. Perhaps it was that which led to them no longer seeing her as someone who needed to be watched at all times.

Nearly two months into the young woman’s new life, the gentleman came back to the house at sunset from a day in town, and from the moment she opened her eyes, she could sense his fury.

“They suspect us,” he said flatly, and that was when she realized that while he had left with one of their companions, he had returned alone.

“Don’t worry about him,” the gentleman said darkly, and his expression was more dangerous than she had ever seen it. “He got what he deserved for allowing us to be exposed. But we must leave, and we must leave now.”

The young woman knew, by now, that what followed was a practiced routine. Gathering belongings, killing the women, burning the house down, moving on.

They traveled further this time, a full four and a half days. They even stopped one night at a small, barely inhabited inn on the side of the road, which was not inhabited by anyone by the time they left it the next morning (with the innkeeper’s wife, bound and gagged and drugged, along with them). The new house they traveled to was nestled into the side of a mountain, a far more isolated location than either of the others. As usual, their coffins waited for them in the darkest room of the cellar, nestled into the dirt.

The gentleman had seemed purposeful but distracted during their entire trip, only relaxing when they arrived at the home, dropping their belongings and tying up the innkeeper’s wife. By then, it was well past sunrise, nearly noon, and the entire band was—not quite tired, for they did not feel tired anymore. But certainly in need of replenishment.

“Take the watch,” the gentleman told the young woman as he opened the lid of his coffin, the words spat absently over his shoulder. “We’ll need our strength for hunting.” And, as she watched, all six of them climbed into their coffins and, within minutes, had closed their eyes, sinking into their near-death state.

She knew why she was the one taking the watch now. They needed their rest, and as she was the weakest hunter, the newest of them, she was the most expendable. Even if she’d had time to do so, she would not have argued it, despite the fact that what passed for exhaustion in this life was tugging at her limbs even as she sat, watching them.

She sat for two hours, motionless, counting each minute slowly. It took her that long to believe that she was now the only one awake, that she was, for the first time in her new life, truly and completely alone.

She left the house first, knowing that if she was caught, she could say that the house was isolated enough that no one would catch them even if she were gone; she could claim overwhelming hunger, or a desire to bring in more fresh prey. But what she really wanted to do was find the largest, sturdiest nearby tree and break a branch roughly the size and shape of her forearm from it.

Each of the members of the gang carried a knife with them at all times, and the young woman was no exception. Hers was the smallest, but it was more than enough for the task of whittling one end of the branch to a sharp point.

When the young woman returned to the house, she stood at the base of the stairs to the cellar, listening for any sound. She crept towards the back room, the branch in her hand, and did not let herself relax until she again saw six occupied coffins, six unmoving figures inside them.

Her next order of business was the innkeeper’s wife, dangling from the ceiling, her breath the heavy, shallow breathing of a drugged sleep. She did not wish to kill her with her blade, or with any of the knives at her feet—there was too much chance that the smell of fresh blood might wake one of her companions. So instead she knelt to retrieve the small pouch of the herbs used to drug the women, and she carefully measured out three times the dose required to make them sleep through the day.

Forcing them down the woman’s throat while she was unconscious was difficult, but the young woman managed, and she did not move until she heard the exact moment that the woman’s breathing went from slowing to stopping completely.

Only one step remained, then, and this would be the hardest, but the most important.

The young woman could not use her own knife—for this task, it was too small. So she had to liberate one from the body of one of her companions; the gentleman, of course, had the biggest knife, but he would also be the one most likely to wake from the lightest of touches, so she dared not risk it. She settled for one of medium size, and was grateful that she had become adept enough at maneuvering unobtrusively to lift it from the man’s body without touching him.

She set her own blade down by the door and sheathed the knife in her own sheath. At her waist was a pouch of garlic she had stolen from the inn—the smell burned her nostrils almost unbearably, but she did not have a choice. It would be worth the sacrifice.

It took all of her strength to bury the stake into the heart of the prone form, but once it pierced skin, the body gave way, sagging inwards in silence. Cutting off his head was harder still, tired as she was, but he did not bleed when it was separated from his body, only released a slow gush of thick black ooze. After that, the effort required to force his mouth open and stuff the garlic inside was easy. She did not know how much she needed, but she hoped that the amount she had would be enough, for all of them.

Her entire body ached when she was finished, her arm worst of all, but she could not rest yet. She still had much more to do.

 

She saved her false husband for last, although it took the longest time to drive the stake into his body and remove his head. The first one she had destroyed was already crumbling into dust by then, and she wanted to watch all of what he had created lying in ruins around him as she ended his existence.

The sun was slowly sinking in the sky when she was finished, and golden light illuminated the forest when she gathered all she wanted to carry and set the fire. She watched the light from the sun glow alongside the light of the flames as the house caught, as the fire grew and grew, climbing to the topmost floors of the house, and she watched until the ceilings and floors began to collapse, and it caved in on itself, and the flames fed on the bones of the house.

Then she turned away, and she looked into the sunset, and she took her first steps into the beginning of her own life.

**Author's Note:**

> I was extremely intrigued by the prompt's suggestion of the robber bridegroom forcibly inducting the bride into his gang (although I always intended to have her turn the tables on him in the end anyway), but it wasn't until I decided to follow the other suggestion of making them vampires that the whole thing _really_ came together. Though, again, I certainly didn't intend for it to come together with _quite_ so many words. Fingers crossed that they're enjoyable words.
> 
> Thank you for the inspiring prompt, dear recipient! I hope this was what you were hoping for, and I hope you enjoyed it! <3


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